NGE: Nobody Dies: Ichi's Birthday Party
by EarthScorpion
Summary: An addition to Gregg Landsman's "NGE: Nobody Dies".  The awareness of the Evangelion Units means that there is a certain responsibility towards them.  And so, once a year, Ichi gets a hat, a cake, and a day with Mommy.  And her sisters visit, too.
1. Episode 01: Preparations

**Neon Genesis Evangelion: Nobody Dies - Ichi's Birthday Party**  
**  
Episode 01 – Preparations for the Special Girl**

...**  
**

Those familiar with Gendo Ikari would be able to tell that he was not happy. It might have been the way that he was closed in on himself, expression held rigid. It might have been the cold, clipped manner in which he spoke. It might have even been the way that he had begun the conversation with the phrase, "Yui, I am not happy with you doing this. Not one bit," although that was _surely_ madness, to extrapolate such emotions from what he had said.

It didn't really matter. He was going to lose anyway, he knew, which was why the conversation was happening in his spacious office, with no-one else present, so, at least if he was going to lose, no-one would see him do so. Of course, Deputy Commander Fuyutsuki would know that he had lost, and would probably make a few remarks about it, but both of them knew about the power dynamics at NERV, and so such things could easily be ignored.

"Nonsense," the Head Scientist of NERV responded to her husband, with a roll of her eyes. "You know I'm going to do this, Gendo, just as I did last year, and the year before that. And just like then, you are going to try to dissuade me, fail, and decide not to push the issue, unless you want to be sleeping on the couch for the next month."

That was, unfortunately, true. But this year, Gendo had a reason to be more assertive than usual. "You couldn't hold to that," he said, tilting his head slightly.

Yui narrowed her eyes. "I think you overestimate your chances." She shook her head. "And your prowess."

Gendo winced. "Ouch. But... you know I don't like you going into the VR world."

"And as I've told you many times before, it's perfectly safe. I am going _nowhere_ near the entry plug. I am not even going to be going in full-immersion; this will be goggles and motion sensors. There is no neural connection, or anything _at all_ which be used as an attack vector."

"But you still shouldn't expose yourself to the monster in there more than is necessary at all," the man protested, his words measured. "I know your weaknesses, and I'm afraid you're letting your instincts overwhelm your rationality... instincts and guilt alike. Just because it acts human doesn't mean that it really is at all."

"Talkin' about me?" asked a voice from right beside his left ear.

Gendo remained remarkably calm. The sigh he let out was one of frustration, not fear. "No, Rei," he said, turning to look at his 12-year old adopted daughter, and noting the open vent hatch in the roof. And the new lock he had installed which had been torn out, and was clutched in her hand. Silently, he held out his palm, for Rei to give it to him. The lock was filed in his desk drawer.

"That's good," she said cheerfully, before turning to Yui. "Come on, Mommy," she said. "We're going to be late for the trip, and none of us want that! 'Cause there's going to be ice-cream and waffles and sugar... lots and lots and _lots_ and _lots_ of sugar and 'cause it's not ree~aallly real, it means you don't get fat or anything!"

Yui and Gendo shared a look. With a glance, the silent words '_We somehow need to stop Lieutenant Ibuki from lending Rei those magazines written for teenage girls, but which she still reads. They're a bad influence. But, wait, isn't it normal for an almost teenage girl to worry about this kind of thing? Don't we want to be encouraging her normalcy? On the other hand, she's Rei, and brings a whole host of problems which the parents of normal teenage girls don't have to put up with. And she might get __**ideas**__. God, parenting is hard work_,' were exchanged.

It was a remarkably verbose glance.

"Come on, stop staring at each other!" Rei interrupted. "We gotta go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! I like the word 'Go'! Go! Go! Go! My favourite word is 'Go'! Go! G..."

"... that... that's enough, Rei," Yui managed. "Just go..."

"...Go!"

"... yes, okay. Just... _wait_ outside, while your father and I finish discussing something."

Rei grinned, her lips splitting open a little wider than might be viewed as conventionally attractive, or, indeed, human. "I'll 'Go!' make up the couch," she said, as she disappeared into the vents again.

Gendo sighed. "And that's my other objection," he added, in a softer voice. "You've shown, over the last few years, that you can handle yourself. But... last year was bad. This year will be worse. Do you think you're really up to handling eight... eight! I'd just like to emphasise it again... _eight_... of them, when they'll all be hyped up on sugar." He paused, and glanced directly behind him. "I mean... do we really want the controlling intelligence to end up like that?"

He noticed the slight shudder from his wife; that, at least, was a slight moral victory. Which wasn't to say that he wasn't going to lose, however. "It's not that bad," Yui managed. "I mean, I was difficult when I was that age..."

Gendo fixed her with a level stare. "Yui," he said, firmly. "Whatever you were like, I can guarantee that, despite what _your father_ might say, you were not as bad as _eight_ Nephilim all going through puberty at the same time."

"And that's why it's important that I do this kind of thing!" Yui retorted. "We need to keep them interested, and give them at least some normal family experiences. We do some things together, and they seem to look forwards to it for at least a month in advance, and that's important. And... well, it's a way to spend more time with them, and I know I can't. It's a treat for all of them. Not just for Ichi." She stared at him. "Of course, it would be easier for me if you would come along..." she added, a hint of menace in her voice.

"Morituri nolumus mori," muttered her husband.

"What was that?"

"Nothing, dear," Gendo replied instantly. "Just have a tendency to slip into Latin when I know you're right."

Yui narrowed her eyes, but let it pass.

"I'm still not doing it, though," he added.

...

The servos of the crane shrieked, as they hoisted their vast, yet surprisingly fragile cargo into the air. There were entire teams working on this project. The Magi staff were carefully micromanaging the precise stresses of the machinery, even as men and women in fluorescent jackets, unwilling to leave a project of this magnitude exclusively up to machines, glowsticks in hands, carefully observed the motion, willing to call a stop to it at any time.

"Papa Hotel has been elevated! I repeat, Papa Hotel is elevated! We are ready to commence lateral motion at your commands, before we begin Operation Descent!"

The brown-haired senior scientist at Project Evangelion ran her hands through her hair, and sighed. This was an incredibly stressful procedure, and she was glad that this maintenance work only had to be done once a year. "Okay!" called out Ritsuko, then realised that she still had the radio clutched in her hand, and mentally shook her head at her own stupidity. As if anyone would be able to heard her when they were all having to wear ear protection. She depressed the button, and spoke, "Itsuko, how are we going with the feed?"

The maintenance engineer shook her head unconsciously, as she answered on her own radio. "We're having problems, Dr Akagi! We've got the feeding tubes in, but the viscosity issues from last time are still there! It doesn't make sense. They were working fine in all the tests!"

Ritsuko paled. "This is a problem. Keep on trying, and when Papa Hotel is in place, we'll see if we can get to the route of the problem. Get anyone who knows anything about fluid dynamics and shock physics on the case in the meantime."

"Understood, Dr Akagi. Over and out."

One of the key problems with the Evangelions, as a general fact of their existence, was the nature of physical, Euclidean reality. Although they had a certain... _laxity_ from their nature (and Dr Ikari still refused to explain to anyone how on Earth they didn't simply sink into the ground from ground pressure; the betting pool currently had "The ground is too afraid of them to let them enter it" as the favoured explanation), there were still some nasty physical constraints. In this case, the problems came from the simple law that, as scale increased by a factor of r, tensile strength increased by r squared, while volume, and thus mass, increased by r cubed. Which caused certain engineering problems.

As a result, the orange-and-red party hat that they were lowering onto Evangelion Unit 01, carefully fitting it over the horn, was high-grade laminar steel, reinforced by strategically-placed interior buttresses. Questions over whether it was _really_ necessary to conduct this massive engineering project every single year had been directed to Deputy Director Fuyutsuki, who had passed them to Commander Ikari, who had immediately redirected them to Dr Ikari. And then the questions had stopped, and the apologies had started.

And what of the cake? What, indeed, of the cake? The cake... was a issue. A six-year old girl, to name a completely-arbitary-and-not-at-all-associated-with-the-self-image-of-a-certain-sixty-metre-tall-war-machine example, was approximately one metre tall. To scale an appropriate cake, when metabolic differences were taken into account, required a baked good eighty-four times larger dimensionally. Which required five hundred and ninety two thousand, seven hundred and four times the ingredients.

The ingredients for Unit 01's birthday cake were listed as a separate budgetary item on NERV's expenses (under "Miscellaneous Annual Unit Pacification And Control Items", incidentally). They included things such as 104 metric tonnes of butter, and again of brown castor sugar, the zest from 2.4 million oranges and the same number of eggs, 60 tonnes of self-raising flour, six-hundred thousand tablespoons of baking powder, and 180 tonnes of white chocolate.

And, this year, eight candles.

Things were made worse by the fact that the Evangelion was not actually permitted to eat the cake, and instead had it piped in through its nutrient feeds. Which were designed for nice, simple, bland protein and carbohydrate mixtures, and not a rich white-chocolate-and-orange cake which had been personally chosen by Dr Ikari. They had been forced to go to NERV Germany to ask for help on solving the fluid intake issues, and Dr Soryu had not appreciated the, from her point of view, waste of her time in having to solve the issue on how to feed an Evangelion an appropriately-scaled cake.

She had been... caustic. One might even say vitriolic.

Ritsuko could, for once, understand _exactly_ how the other scientist felt.

There _had_ to be better ways of doing this.

...

A lone house stood on a grassy plain, the rolling acres stretching out as far as the eye could see, until they melted away into the blue of the horizon. Small deciduous copses and lone trees (some of which had rope or tire swings hanging from them) broke up the monotony of the green, notably clustered around a lake. Birds sang, crickets and cicadas chirruped, and the fish in the water... well, they bubbled, or whatever fish do when not observed. In this particular case, they decreased in texture detail and model resolution, to save on processing capacity, but the inhabitant of this space wasn't meant to know that.

It was, in fact, the very image of rural tranquili...

"Heee~ey!"

"He~eeey!"

"Hee~eey!"

"Heeee~y!"

"Heeeey~!"

"~Heeeey~!"

"H~eeeey!"

"..."

The lone dissenter was glared at by the other blue-haired girls. "You're breakin' the pattern," muttered one of her sisters. "And being booo~ooring."

"I don't see how not being precisely the same, baring slight intonational variance, as everyone else makes me bo..." the other one managed, before a stare from Yui (her figure slightly translucent, and wavery, for she alone was not in full immersion) silenced the blue-haired, red-eyed gaggle. Although, in truth, that was probably not the most appropriate collective noun. They were certainly not a parliament, because they lacked the decorum and sense of propriety for such a thing. 'A culture', 'an intrusion', 'a troupe', 'a murder' (although that one had been rejected on the grounds that it was probably a bad idea to give _them_ bad ideas); all of these had been considered by people with too much free time on their hands. In truth, they were simply, "The Ree". Eight, pubescent, physiologically and biologically (mentally was a completely different question, as was, come to mention it, chronologically) twelve-year old, human-Angel hybrids. Yes.

"Now, I don't think I need to discuss the _Rules_ again, do I?" asked Yui, with a hint of menace in her voice. "Because this is Ichi's birthday, and I _am not_ going to have any of you ruin it for her, understand. Or I will be _very_ disappointed in you."

"Oh, come on!" squeaked Kiko, her cheeks flushed. "Like we'd do that. Ichi is _cuuu~uuute_! That means we want to make our Little Sister happy!"

Yui pursed her lips slightly. Kiko was not, in truth, the one she was worried about (and she was one of the easy ones, anyway). And, technically speaking, as a mother, she wasn't meant to approve of a hierarchy of logic which put adorableness as a higher quality than personality or blood-relation, but... well, Ichi was going to stay cute for a very long time, she thought, with a twinge of guilt.

Yes. That was the other thing about these family incursions with her daughters. They were bittersweet blends of self-loathing and joy. But she wasn't going to think about that, or tell it to them. It would only upset them with things that they couldn't change, or be blamed for.

She shook her head, almost immeasurably, and looked at her daughters. "Okay," Yui said, the same maternal tone in her voice. "Now, I'm going to issue the presents now. I have locked them, so only Ichi can open them; that means that I want them to stay sealed, until you can give them to her. That is not a challenge that they should be opened. You chose them, so you know what's inside. You don't need to open them to find out."

"... was going to get her a draa~aagon," muttered Zyuu, loud enough to be audible. "And it was going to be green and purple and everything, to match her armour."

"Yes, and dragons aren't suitable pets for eight year old girls."

"But _I_ had one when I was eight."

Her mother sighed. "You _coded_ one when you were _seven_. And," her expression softened, "remember, Ichi is... immature for her age."

"Cu~uute and snugly and adorable," confirmed Kiko. "Even if, if she ree~eeeally wanted to, she could be like 'graaaw' and _stompstompstomp rip-rip_."

"Yes, and we don't mention that to her, Kiko," said Yui. "And neither do you, Nana, for all you think that it would be 'pretty cool' to be an Evangelion Unit."

The blue-haired girl, black hairband holding it back from her face, nodded. "'Kay."

"Now, come on, Mommy," said Rei, bouncing up and down in front of Yui. "We doo~oooo know the Rules, and we know what to do, and we know that we won't be allowed to come any more if we upset Ichi."

"Yeah!" added Iti. "And we've got the presents, and stuff, and so we can go give them to her!"

Yui Ikari's image flickered as, outside in the real world, she flipped up her visor, and checked the current position of the controlling intellect of Unit 01. "She's in the house," she said, returning her attention back into the simulation, "probably waiting for us."

"She does that," said Kei, softly. "Every year."

"Yes." There was a blink of an eye, and the group was suddenly relocated, to the outside of the square brick house. "Okay," said Yui, lowering her voice, and smiling. "On the count of three, we'll open the door, and start singing." She paused, and checked that the synch-counter, for the teams out in the Eva bay was working. The green light reassured her that the music was ready there, too, along with the technical staff (who were now wearing party-hats over the top of their regulation hard hats). "Using the _proper_ words to the song," she added, producing a few slightly guilty looks. "One. Two. Three!"

The door swung open, and the sheer look of childish delight in the eyes of the brown-haired girl sitting calmly on the sofa in the living room really made it all worthwhile.

"Happy birthday to yooo~ooouuuu..."

...


	2. Episode 02: And, Lo, There Were Biscuits

**Neon Genesis Evangelion: Nobody Dies - Ichi's Birthday Party**

**Episode 02 – And, 'Lo, There Were Biscuits**

* * *

...

* * *

There have been sounds associated with the start of battle which have driven a spike of terror into the hearts of mortal men. The warcry of the Cossacks, fundamentally linked with rapine and arson, the pounding of the feet of a Roman legion, and the chatter of a row of machine-gun positions against a hapless horde of infantry have all bought terrifying flashbacks. Old men, crippled by the depravities of war, have stared into their locally-used-containers of their alcoholic beverage of choice, and shivered, remembering all the faces that had marched to war with them, never to return, their corpses piled upon some foreign field like so much carrion.

The equivalent for the early twenty-first century, to those in the know, was almost certainly the cry of an Evangelion. A ferocious, animalistic (no... animalistic wasn't the right word; _demonic_ was more accurate) bellow with, to those prone to overimagination, oddly _human_ undertones. At this point, not one had been used in anger. The nations of the world were very, very glad of that fact, because those things were estimated, if the intelligence reports, combined with NERV's official reports to the UN, to be able to take a full battleship broadside to the chest, and still be able to carry on functioning. And that was before the AT-Field was taken into account, which was unquantified, as of yet, and even believed by some to be a limitless-defence, capable of expanding its defensive capabilities to deal with any threat.

To those in the know, such a noise from an Evangelion which lacked a pilot or an entry plug was even more worrying. Much, much more worrying.

Unit 01 _screamed_, its head twitching around in the restraints, sending the pipes which were feeding the carbohydrate-rich slurry (with a rich chocolaty flavour, and a hint of orange) to the Evangelion whipping around. There was a cry, as a platform overturned, sending suited workers flying down into the reddish-purple fluid with a series of splashes. There was, in fact, general havoc.

"Independent movement... we have independent movement! Moving to amber alert!"

"Get everyone out of the chamber! Prepare the Bakelite!" ordered Dr Akagi, waving the crew onwards, even as the technical staff grabbed what equipment they could.

"It's... no AT-Field. The Unit isn't manifesting an AT-Field."

"Odd neural patterns! Odd neural patterns! Is... is it going berserk?" called out Maya, sweat beading on her forehead, even as she scooped up the laptop, and began to scurry for the exit, gaze still lowered to the computer.

With a clang, the restraints for one of the arms came flying off, scything through the air with a noise like a child tearing tin foil. With a yell, Dr Akagi dived at her shorter assistant, knocking her over and sending the laptop flying into the coolant fluid as the restraint flew by at head height, tumbling end over end.

Maya Ibuki let out a squeak from somewhere underneath the brown-haired woman's breasts, a noise somewhat muffled by the labcoat, and fainted.

Ritsuko pulled herself to her feet, "Yui, _what the hell_ is going on in there!" she screamed, clutching the radio in whitened knuckles. "The Eva's... it's breaking its bonds, and we're getting really odd neural activity! Get out of there!"

Elsewhere in the facility, the body of Yui Ikari, enmeshed in motion sensors, bought a gloved hand into clanging contact with the virtual reality helmet she was wearing. Elsewhere, in virtual space, her avatar replicated the gesture, although the space did produce the fleshy slap of a palm against a forehead.

"Kiko," she said, in a stern voice, glaring at the blue-haired girl crouched over the smaller, younger brunette who was squirming on the floor, "Stop tickling Ichi."

* * *

...

* * *

It took a few minutes after that to properly calm down Ichi, although, mercifully, once the direct tickling had ceased, the thrashing of her Evangelion body stopped, and allowed the slow process of repair to begin. And, despite her calm, even smiling face, Yui could feel her stomach crawling up into a little ball. The budgetary expenses for this birthday were going to be even larger than normal. And these parties were not exactly cheap, especially when the elevated price of food in the post-Impact world, and the necessary overtime which the technical staff had to pull were taken into account. Worse, the clauses for unpaid overtime in NERV employees' contracts covered situations like any possible future Angel attacks, or other such emergencies.

They had not managed to find a loophole in the employment contracts to declare a birthday party an emergency. Even if Ritsuko had started begging after what had happened last year.

Yui put the thoughts aside, and glanced down the table, at all nine of her daughters, who were, to varying extents, stuffing their faces with the virtual party food on the table. She couldn't touch any of it, of course; she wasn't here, not really, and... well, even if it had been real, it wasn't as if she could have eaten any of this high-sugar stuff anyway. An annoyance. But the girls, none of whom she had carried to term, or were, in fact, human, were enjoying it just as anyone else their age would. Just like any other human would. They were people, yes, certainly, but they were not human, although, to varying degrees, were capable of pretending to be so. At least for short periods. And the most human was almost certainly the sixty-metre tall god-thing, loathe though she was to admit it.

Had she been able to tell her self of eight years ago, just before the abortive contact experiment, what her life would be like now... well, she'd probably not believe herself. At least it was better this way. Much better. She was glad; truly, utterly _glad_, she had blinked first, and not tried to outstare the oncoming abyss.

"You've all got even taller," piped up Ichi, who was sitting on Kiko's lap, to the left of her. The little girl paused. "Well, apart from you, Mommy," she corrected herself, conscientiously, "because you haven't grown at all since last year."

Yui nodded. "That's right," she said. "They're all growing. Sometimes I think I can hear Rei's bones creak."

"Oh, come on!" Rei interjected. "That was too~ootally an accident. I didn't mean to do that."

Yui smiled, though with a slight wince. "I... I was actually talking about how fast you've been growing," she said. "Not what happened when you broke into one of the sausage-making factories in the industrial district."

"It wasn't just sausage! They did bacon, and gammon, and bacon, and ham, and bacon, and bacon."

"You said bacon four times."

"I like bacon." Rei's eyes flashed red. "As in, _re~eeally_ like it." To emphasise it, she grabbed a virtual handful of those little sausages wrapped in bacon, and stuffed them into her mouth.

"Wee~eeell, I don't think that eating meat is really ethically sound or stuff," interjected Iti. "I mean, I did that thing where you look at the things which go into making things, and it turns out things are much more efficient if you stop people eating meat. And that's really kinda important, when you look at the food problems Second Impact made."

"Wait, was that the things I really liked?" asked Kiko, a confused look on her face.

"Naa~aaah," Iti said, shaking her head. "Nah. You were..."

"What?" called out Nana, from the other end of the table, where she and Siyon were locked, talking, heads close together. Ingrained maternal instincts from Yui were screaming that she should separate them, before one caught nits off the other, before her active consciousness kicked in, and she was reminded that a) this was a simulation, and b) the number of things that could feed off Siyon's blood without being rapidly vivisected could be measured on the fingers of a blind, leprous butcher . "What're you sayin' about me?"

"Wasn't talking to you, Nana."

"Why'da say my name, then?"

"I didn't."

Ichi crossed her arms, and pouted slightly, creating a slightly euphoric squeak from Kiko. "I was trying to talk," she said, grumpily. "As I was saying, you've all gotten taller." She paused. "Apart from Mommy," she corrected herself again.

"Don't worry, Ichi!" Hatchi said, enthusiastically, waving a glass full some something bright red and sticky in the air, and managing to splash quite a bit over Iti. "You're still waa~aaay taller than the rest of us." The blue-haired girl ignored the sudden warning glare thrown at her by Yui. "Even if, right, we all stood on each other's shoulders."

"I woo~oonder if we could all merge into one super-Ayanami?" said Kiko, resting her chin on Ichi's head. "Would we be taller then?"

There was silence from the others, barring the glass of blue (not 'blue' anything, just... blue) being thrown at Hatchi, and even a few scared looks thrown at their mother. Yui had always been very careful to impress upon them the difference between safe speculation, which they could talk about, even if they weren't allowed to do it, and unsafe speculation, which they weren't even allowed to think about, and even if they did happen to think it up, really, really weren't meant to share with their sisters. That was decidedly _unsafe_ speculation. And, yes, had the idea come from anyone but Kiko, Yui would in fact have been deeply concerned. But... well, Kiko's ideas were typically somewhat... freeform in their methodology. It was almost certain that she hadn't meant anything sinister or hypothetically-Third-Impact-or-at-very-least-Angel causing, but instead had been trying to work out a way to get all of them to count as being taller than their chronologically-older-mentally-younger sister. Or maybe half-sister.

Language was not really designed to deal with Yui Ikari's family, it had been agreed at NERV by those in the know. For one, it was hard to be polite enough while doing so, unless you had grown bored of your job. And possibly your health and/or life and/or sanity, come to think of it.

"I do not believe that would be an enjoyable thing to do, Kiko," Kei, sitting at Yui's right said softly. She was always the quieter, clingy one.

"Oh yeah. Good point. It'd be kinda dull. Kinda really dull. We'd just be like _*merge*_, and then we'd go compare our heights, and... _bleeargh_." Kiko pulled a face. "Boooo~ooooooring."

There were scattered sighs of relief around the table. Apart from Ichi, who was still pouting.

"I'm trying to talk, you know. But you're not listening! It's not **fair!** I am **interesting**, aren't I?"

"Yeah," Rei said, through a mouth full of a virtual chocolate-covered chocolate-centred chocolate cake with chocolate sprinkles. "Course you are. 'Cause it's yooo~oour birthday, and that means you're the specialist." Rei paused, cocking her head. "Specialist? Specialest?" She nodded. "Mostest superest special person for today!"

"Mostest bestest superest special person ever!" added Nana.

"Yes, Ichi, you are interesting," confirmed Kei.

The little girl nodded her head once. "Good. 'Cause, as I was saying, you've all, apart from Mommy, got taller. But what I was trying to say, yes, is that you're all different shapes, too. I mean, right, Kiko is more comfortable to sit on."

"Is it nice? Are they good changes?" asked Kiko, hugging Ichi tighter.

"No, they're not," Yui just heard Kei mutter, from her right.

"Yeah!" grinned Ichi. "You're softer and less bony! It's nice!"

"It ree~eeaally is nice, isn't it?" said Kiko, with a sudden hint of thoughtfulness in her voice. "And softness and huggableness are really nice, aren't they?"

"I like hugs," Ichi confirmed.

Yui's insides squirmed. "I'm so sorry I can't hug you more, Ichi," she said, her tone suddenly stricken. "Or at all. It's just that I can't be here, in here with you, ever. I never can be."

"It's all right," Ichi said, turning and trying to pat her mother on the shoulder, only waving her hand through her immaterial-in-this-virtual-reality body. "You give me cake. Real cake. And cake is like hugs for the tummy, right? And," she let out a small, self-pleased smile, "I have a _really_ big tummy, so this is like a really big hug."

Yui let out a weak smile. "Thank you, Ichi."

"Of _course_, if you could please, please, please," she had her hands clutched up close to her chest, large brown eyes watery, "let me have more cake more times a year..."

The older woman glanced from side to side, noting how several of her daughters seemed to be getting bored, quite apart from the fact that the conversation seemed to be getting into _expensive_ territory. Even by NERV's standards, which were somewhat laxer than most parental budgets. "I think it's time for presents for Ichi!" she loudly announced.

"Yaaaaaay!"

* * *

...

* * *

The concept of 'presents', when dealing with a sixty metre tall war machine, was somewhat shifted from what it was when dealing with a normal child's birthday. There was less of a shift than one might have expected, though, due to the fact that this sixty-metre war machine did have a virtual sanctum where its psyche spent most of its time, and thus the presents it was given were of use there, as opposed to, say, an appropriately scaled hula-hoop. Suggestions that they somehow persuade Ichi that upgrades to Unit 01 counted as her birthday presents had been ruthlessly crushed by Dr Ikari; a display of maternal affection which had only been somewhat negated by the fact that Ichi herself tended to view them as extra presents _which she didn't have to wait until her birthday for_. Although, it should be noted, they were still viewed as inferior to real birthday presents.

Yui suspected that this was because of the lack of associated cake or parties.

And then came the organisational hassle of the order in which the girls got to give their presents.

Or not, as it so happened this year.

"Yee~eah, there's really no need to bother," Iti explained, with a shrug, as Yui tried to hand out pieces of paper with random numbers on them.

Yui narrowed her eyes. "And why is that?"

"See, what we were thinking is, right, that it normally means we end up doing stuff, and then you go and get all disappointed at us. But, right, we were thinking that there had to be a better way, or at least one which was way more fun. So we just had a marital arts contest..."

Yui spluttered. "What?"

Her daughter frowned. "Huh?"

"You _what_?"

"Oh, come on. It's not like we haven't ever ever done it before. Tonnes and tonnes and _tooo~oonnes_ of times."

"Bwha?"

"You know, getting up close and _personal_ with each other."

"Bwha?"

"Sometimes it's better to get everyone doing it together, in a ree~eeally big ball of stuff, but sometimes it's more fun if two, like Kiko and someone else, right, do it, and the rest of us watch."

"Hargelen?"

"I mean, we _could_ even do it here again, but I knoo~ooow you wouldn't want Ichi doing it, 'cause she's too young... even if she's, like, older than us, and then we'd probably need new clothes and you don't let us make stuff in Ichi's world for _soo~oome_ reason, and, you know, doin' it is kinda exhausting."

"Fhtagn?"

"Lotsa fun, though." Iti fell silent.

They started at each other in mutual incomprehension for a moment, Yui turning increasingly red, although whether through embarrassment or anger, it was hard to tell.

"You mean 'martial arts'," Kei said softly, leaning in while, behind her, Siyon was taking the opportunity of Yui's distraction to give Ichi an impromptu lecture on the proper way to hold a progressive knife, using one of the plastic ones on the table as a demonstration.

The glace cherry on top of Cakeiel, the temporarily designated 'Angel of Cake', was suffering major core damage in the process.

"Oh, yeah," Iti said.

"You have a noted deficiency in your linguistic skills, including a tendency towards vagueness and excessive use of metasyntactic variables in situations which warrant clarity beyond that which imprecise terms can provide. You might want to consider putting effort into remedying it."

"And yooo~oou have a noted deficiency in your... stuff! _You_ might want to consider puttying effort into remedying it." Iti retorted.

"Oh, well done. How long were you thinking about that comeback?" Kei paused. "And you meant 'putting', not 'puttying'."

From behind them, the lecture could be heard. "And then you adjust your grip, 'cause for fine cutting, you want your index finger... that's like your one next to your thumb, running along the back of the blade, 'cause that way, you give up stabbiness for ree~eally close control."

"But if there's actually an Angel of Cake," Ichi said, her tone a little upset, "then doesn't that mean that cake might be evil? Sort of, not really true?"

"Nah. Nah. I mean..."

"What _is_ it?" called out Nana.

"Not talking to you, Nana!" shouted back Siyon. "Anyway, right, there's meant to be an Angel of Embyros, too, and they're _babies_, and _babies_ can nee~eever be evil. Yeah? Makes sense?"

Ichi paused, and nodded seriously. "Yes. That makes sense." She licked her lips. "Can't I just eat an Angel of Cake, though?" Her pupils dilated slightly. "Oh, wow," she said, in a dreamy voice. "It would be like every birthday added together... though without the spending fun-time with you," she hastened to reassure her instructor.

"Not the point, Ichi. There isn't ree~eeally an Angel of Cake, it's just a target for the stabbin' and slicin' and cuttin' and..."

"You don't knoo~oow that, Siyon," interjected Kiko. "I mean, there might be. And... and it would be big, and float, and... and it would have a jam filling of LCL, and its core would be this ree~eeally big cherry on top, and it should shoot laser beams _pewpewzaa~aaap_ from the sprinkles, and, like, the icing should be made of tentacles and stuff and it could ooze off and make little cakes... or maybe meringues. Yes. Meringues. I like meringues. They're all fluu~uuffy and suu~uugary and taa~aasty," Kiko sang.

Both Ichi and Siyon stared at her blankly for a moment. "What's a mermang?" Ichi finally asked, curiosity in her voice.

Kiko patted her on the head. "You'll find out when you're older," she said.

"While that's technically true, that's not a helpful reply, Kiko," Yui said, but too late to stop the next question.

"Is it something to do with girls and when they get older and why you're more comfortable to sit on? Because I think that's what 'You'll find out when you're older means'."

"No, darling. A meringue is something made from sugar and egg whites all whisked together. It normally has added cream, and strawberries or raspberries or other things on top."

"Oh. That does sound nice."

Yui paused. "We could look into getting you one for next year," she said, slowly, before frowning. "It wouldn't be as nice, though," she said, "as well, the fact we have to feed it through the nutrient pipes means that it'll lose its texture."

"But it still sounds nice," Ichi said, a slight frown on her face.

"Well, maybe. As I said, we'll look into..."

"Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!"

Yui sighed, both gloved hands colliding with her VR helmet. Turning, the cluster of blue-haired girls (including, somehow, both Siyon and Kiko, who had been remarkably fast to get there) had already formed a lose circle, insofar as a circle can be composed of only six people, around a warring pair.

In the centre of the pseudo-circle, Iti smashed a chair into Kei's face, only to get an underarm-lobbed cupcake into the middle of the forehead, which stuck. These combats were actually unusual for a form of Ree-based violence, as they were utterly and clearly locked as Users, not Superusers, inside Ichi's simulation, and so the normal reality warping and use of hammer_.exe was replaced with vicious and rather malevolent improvised combat. Hence, when Iti charged forwards, spork in hand, she was disarmed with a ladle which continued into her leg, causing her to stumble, and mash herself forwards into Kei in a bear hug. The momentum of the pair carried them forwards into the table, and, with a smashing of cutlery and glasses, they began to roll, only accentuating the destruction to the euphoric enthusiasm of their blue-haired sisters.

"Ooh," said Ichi, eyes alight, "the fight. I was wondering why it was taking so long so start," she added, as Kei managed to end up on top, and started holding Iti facedown in the trifle bowl, volcanic eruptions of air being forced out from the dessert and splattering everywhere.

Yui looked down at the little brown-haired girl. "You were expecting this?" she asked, split between the urge to intervene, and curiosity over Ichi's statement. She was, at least, glad that Gendo wasn't here right now. He'd have a few things to say about the techniques the two were using; Yui could see, just at a glance, how relatively sloppy they were. And then she'd have to send him to sleep on the couch for a week, for 'corrupting' them, and those occasions were always a real try of her willpower to hold out for the full duration of his punishment.

"Of _coo~oourse_," Ichi drawled, the arrogance of a small child in her tone. "This is what always happens in between the end of the not-real food, you saying we should open the presents, and me getting my presents. I mean, they're starting to get bored by now, so they just start fighting, but it's okay unlike real fighting, because it's not real fighting and no-one gets hurt," which was an unfortunate thing to say, perhaps, because at that point an ascending leg with an not-inconsiderable amount of force behind it was elevated with extreme prejudice between Kei's legs, sending her flying off over into the drinks table. Staggering, dripping with blue, red, and even orange, the girl pulled herself to her feet, eyes slightly crossed, only to be hit by the charge of her trifle-covered sister.

With a few thoughts, Yui realised that, yes, Ichi was right. And that she'd pointed the same thing out last year, but Yui had forgotten.

_So much for a normal family outing,_ she thought, shaking her head. _If this has become so mundane that Ichi expects it... oh well._

"This is normally the point at which you stop them, and then tell them that they're going to be sent back to the Magi if they don't stop acting up and trying to ruin my birthday," Ichi pointed out, as Iti tried to punch Kei in the face, and Kei tried to headbutt Iti's fist. There was a moment of confusion, as both stumbled backwards, one clutching their forehead, the other massaging their hand, before they were both picked up and separated by glowing bluish-white forcefield bubbles, the lines of projection emanating from Yui's fingers.

"Oooo~oooh," was the general consensus of the onlookers, with a minority report of "Pree~eeetty."

Yui sucked in a breath, and got her thoughts in order. "Girls," she managed.

"She called me stupid!"

"I did not! The word 'stupid' was not used once."

"She called me a load of long words which all _mee~eean_ stupid!"

"... she was the one who initiated violence!"

"Enough." Yui's words were final. "I am rather disappointed in you. This is Ichi's birthday, and you certainly _will not_ ruin it for her by fighting. Look at it. Look what you did to the table, and all her birthday food."

"Buu~uuut I can't move my head!" whined Iti, body locked in the field.

"Me neither," added Kei.

Spinning, Yui repositioned them such that they _could_ see. "Look! Did you know how long it took me to make all this for this year."

"Didn't you just open the party food fileset?" asked Kiko, frowning, before an elbow to the gut from Rei silenced her. "I mean... _oof_."

"Not. The. Point," snapped Yui, with a glare over at the girl.

"Remember to threaten them," said Ichi, her hand floating where she would be tugging on Yui's skirt, if the woman was actually material.

"Now, if you aren't going to sit down, behave, and be sensible, I will send you both back to the Magi. And," she added, despite her concern that this was possibly setting the wrong example for Ichi, "demote you to User status for two days. _That_ would mean no editing rights at all."

Both of the already pale girls paled further, Kei looking especially upset. "I'll be good," she said very, very quickly.

"Very, very good," added Iti.

"Now..." Yui reached down, back in real space, and flicked the screens over her left eye into Control Mode, selecting the option she had already prepared, "...now is time for presents."

The world disappeared, to be replaced by the infinite white plane of loading. Apart from the bits of trifle and drink dripping down onto the white plane, which discoloured it.

Yui frowned. That wasn't meant to happen. It had somehow been bought along, in some kind of memory overflow issue linked to the use of the Pointer. And just looking at the gleaming look in at least four of her daughters' (she was very glad that the apostrophe was there, as opposed to "daughter's") eyes, they'd noticed it, and were almost certainly trying to work out how to use it to circumvent her own barrier syst... no, wait, five now.

Honestly, she wasn't going to test it herself against the interface barrier between her Magi and one of SEELE's systems. Really.

And the infinite white featureless plane was replaced by a... well, an infinite white _featured_ plane. Very featured, in fact, considering the sheer scale of some of the mounds of wrapping paper.

Very few parents had to consider the problems of wrapping up a _worldspace_.

With a yelp, Ichi darted forwards, grin on her face, before she blinked, and turned, eyes very wide at her mother. "Mommy," she said, clutching her interlocked hands to her mouth, "Please please please _please_ can I open my presents now?"

Yui smiled maternally. "Of course," she said. "Just, remember, you need to check the name tag before you open it," she added, noting the slight pout that it produced on the present-addled little girl's face.

"The biggest one is from mee~eeee!" called out Nana. "So you don't need to check the tag!"

"Yaaaaay!"

It suddenly became necessary to duck away from the explosive flurry of wrapping paper flying everywhere, as a sixty-metre tall version of Ichi started pulling the paper away. Not a sixty metre tall Unit 01, it should be noted. No, this was a giant little girl.

"Wow!"

"I know." Nana looked smug.

"My very own desert island adventure playground." Ichi stared down at Nana, ankle deep in blue-green sea, with perhaps the largest big brown eyes that most beings would ever encounter. "Thank you thank you thank you!"

"Aaa~aand there totally aren't any massive shoota emplacements, wartrak racecourses, fighta bomba landin' strips or anything," Nana said. "Because Little Mommy took them away. Which is... just the superest awesomest thing ever!" she added, after a glare from Yui.

"Next is me!" shouted Hatchi, "'cause I came second. Miii~iiine is over by the one in silver paper, but you'll have to be smaller to find it!"

"'Kay!"

* * *

...

* * *

The emergency teams were already at work fixing the damage that Unit 01 had inflicted on the area with its little outburst or, at the very least, trying to get new restraints in place. There was a general slight relaxation in the workforce, though; the kind of slightly giddy euphoria which comes after extreme stress.

There was, thus, quite a lot of rather urgent dry cleaning needed when the Evangelion began to roar again. Largely because they did not have the restraints back on, but did have quite a few workers nearby.

"Don't worry!" called out Lieutenant Aoba, having taken over Lieutenant Ibuki's workstation. The woman was currently in sickbay, still not having regained consciousness after her fainting incident. The medic said that it was just the stress from almost having been hit by the projectile restraint, although, privately, he was getting a little concerned by the grin on her face, and the periodic cooing noises she was making.

"Why shouldn't we worry!" snapped Ritsuko, turned to glare at the man, who cowered slightly in his seat.

"It's just the presents!" he managed.

The synchronised release of breath from all parties actually tripped a pressure sensor in the chamber, the sudden change triggering alarms in the command room. Which only brought all new kinds of stress.

Aoba was blamed for it.

* * *

... 


	3. Episode 03: Past the Presents

**Neon Genesis Evangelion: Nobody Dies: Ichi's Birthday Party**

**Episode 03 – Past the Presents**

* * *

...

* * *

The thing was terrible, a loathsome blasphemy against man and beast like. Its warped form was a veritable abomination against all right-thinking minds; its squamous hide and grotesque rugose underside were swirling in a vile array of colours, like a murder in a paint factory. Any world where it could exist was not a benevolent one, and anything which had created it, or indeed, tolerated its miserable existence without euthanizing it, was guilty of terrible crimes through their actions or inactions.

It was also, notably, in a tank. Not an 'armoured treads and heavy weapons of death, doom and destruction' tank, but an observation tank. At a zoo.

"You know, it's not reee~eeally that interesting, you know?" said Rei, staring at the bulk.

"Yeah," agreed Nana. "It doesn't even have any proper dakka or choppa bits or stuff."

Zyuu only made an annoyed noise. "I did my beee~eest, all right," she said, crossing her arms. "You know how much of my stuff Little Mommy didn't let us put in the zoo, okay?"

"She only approved three hundred and seven species, out of thirty four thousand and..."

"Shut _uuu~uup_, Kei."

"It's not like your stuff is the only stuff which wasn't let through, either," Iti pointed out. "I had a really _swee~eeet_ bottomical garden ready, and then she voted most of it."

"Yeah!" confirmed Zyuu.

"What's wrong with triffids, anyway?"

"Totally!" Zyuu shook her head. "I dunno what the world's coming to, when Super-Mega-Laser-Zapper-Cyber-Godzilla isn't a proper thing for a party." She sighed. "She made me take off the lasers and the zappers and the cybernetics and make it smaller, too." And, indeed, the sadly downsized Godzilla could just about be seen over the treetops, which were trying to attack it.

"Anyway, I totally had stuff which could kill the triffids if they got out of control. We'd just have to unleash it, and it would make it deader than something... which is really dead," added Iti.

"Me," Nana said with a nod.

"And me," said Hatchi.

"I believe Iti was talking about how she stole my Yggdrasil prototype," Kei said, with a hint of acrimony. "And then 'upgraded' it."

"To be fair, you were totally wastin' it," Nana pointed out. "It wasn't even poisonous. I mean, 'giving you splinters' isn't anywhere near killy enough for a world-tree. Where was the antimatter or x-ray lasers or anything proper? And you had spares, anyway."

Kei sighed. "For the last time, control groups are not spares!"

"Where's Kiko an' Ichi and an' Little Mommy, anyway?" asked Hatchi, changing the topic.

"Petting zoo!" the other girls chorused.

Hatchi facepalmed. "Oh, yeah. Brain not work proper," she said, in a sing-song voice.

* * *

...

* * *

Ichi crouched by the guinea pig, and ran her hand along its back, stroking it. The small, green-furred creature chirruped, and lay down, producing a small squeak of happiness from the little girl. Yui smiled, watching from the sidelines while she simultaneously tried to monitor her other daughters, and Kiko...

... Kiko was at the centre of an increasingly large mound of very fluffy animals. It was not a Zyuu-pile of animals. Such a pile would have been considerably more spiked and scaled, and generally... well, less cuddly. It was, in fact, large enough that there was a small amount of slowdown in the virtual reality, if Yui looked at her. And some clipping issues; enough that, somehow (Yui really didn't want to know how), one of the baby pandas had kittens protruding from its stomach. None of the virtual animals seemed to object to it, of course, although there were some odd queries from their AIs.

Yui deleted some of the animals in the pile. Just for her own sanity.

"Awwwwww!"

"Kiko, no causing memory buffer overflows."

"Buu~uut..."

"I mean it!"

Ichi picked up the guinea pig, and carefully placed it down in the Kiko pile, before picking up a kitten, which stared at her with confused eyes. Tucking it into a pocket of the dress she was wearing, she stepped over towards her mother, and sat down by her feet, staring with a hint of confusion at the way that the other animals seemed to willingly jump onto the mound.

"No, I don't understand it, either, Ichi," Yui said, the corners of her lips curling up.

"Kiko likes fluffy things," Ichi said, with a slight shrug. "A lot. In the same way that Zyuu likes scary big hairy things, and Iti likes plants." She paused. "I don't _really_ get why she likes them _soo~ooo_ much... I mean, they're really cute, but... but, well, she does, and so it makes her happy. So," she stroked the kitten's head, poking from the pocket, "I don't mind her getting to play with all the ones I don't want to."

Her mother looked down, with a hint of pride. "That's a very nice attitude to have, Ichi," she congratulated the little girl, who blushed, pinkly.

"Mommy? Can we go do something else now?" Ichi paused. "Kiko can stay here... but I'm keeping the kitten with me." She tickled its spiky ears, and it mewed.

"Of course, Ichi? Where do you want to go?"

The little girl crossed her arms, and stared up at the sky above her, thinking hard. "We haven't been to the birds yet..." she suggested. "And then the playground funfair bit after that, maybe?"

"That makes sense," Yui agreed. "Kiko, do you..." The woman shook her head. Ichi was right. It would be too much effort to dislodge the blue-haired girl from under the pile of animals. She reached out to take Ichi's hand, and her image, less 'real' than her daughters in this simulation, passed straight through.

An outside observer might have noticed how similarly distraught the looks on the two brunettes' faces were. Both immediately looked away, Yui up to the sky, Ichi, biting her lip, down to the kitten in her pocket. Of course, the only other individual present was buried under a mound of things which were both fluffy and cute, so the moment went unnoticed.

The bird house was both somewhat more realistic than many of the other parts of the Ree-made zoo, and physically located inside a vast, adamant dome. Through the somewhat insectoid, fractured walls, a hurricane of brightly coloured feathers flew. Stepping inside, into the vast hollow space filled with raucous and melodic cries alike, the two stared up into the maelstrom.

"I like the fenix," Ichi stated, pointing up at the comet-like bird which, burning blue-white, cast all the others into dull mundanity. Yui agreed with her completely; the phoenix was one of Zyuu's masterpieces; a genuinely beautiful bird devoid of the eccentricities of many Ree-designed things.

"It is pretty, isn't it." Yui sighed. "It's really a shame they don't exist in the outside world. Things just aren't meant to be on fire."

"Apart from suns, and things that keep people warm, of course," Ichi said, scrupulously.

"Yes, of course."

Slowly, they began to wander through the space.

"Mommy?"

"Yes, Ichi?"

"When will I get to talk to Shinji again?" The little girl's voice was pleading.

Yui's heart sank. Here it was. Every year, she asked this, and every year, she could only give the same answer.

"I don't know, Ichi," she said. "Some time in the next ten years, probably. But not yet."

It wasn't Ichi's fault. Not at all. Considering the fact that, to a considerable extent, she had defined herself through conversations with him, he was a sort of odd brother/father/best-friend figure to her, which merely demonstrated to Yui that human languages currently lacked words to describe family relationships which involved artificial intelligences, or, come to think of it, sixty metre tall mecha.

But on the other hand, she was not going to give Ichi access to him, no matter how much the little girl pleaded. Shinji was currently _safe_ with Tomoe and Alicia, safe away from the mess of Project Evangelion and Ichi and his half-sisters and... and everything. And, therefore, even if it meant that her daughter would look up at her with those large blue eyes (so similar to her own), she would protect her son from everything that this involved.

"I... I understand," said Ichi softly, with a sniff.

"It's not your fault," Yui hastened to reassure her.

"I... I know. It's... it's just that I _miss_ him. Even after years." The words would have been better if they had been wailed, in some kind of tantrum. Well, obviously not from a fiscal point of view, because Ichi's tantrums were _expensive_, but from an emotional point of view. At the very least, it would have been easier for Yui's psyche.

Because she had _made_ this girl to be this sweet and understanding and innocent. It was true that parents shaped their children; she could see traces of herself in the reports Tomoe sent her about Shinji, and in the Ree (some more than others, it should be noted, although they all had her raw intellect).

But they didn't shape them like she had shaped Ichi.

There was an uncomfortable silence between the two, until Ichi caught a glimpse, though the avian tornado of one of the blue-haired girls feeding the birds, and ran over to the figure, who was getting flocked.

"Hello, Ichi," Kei said, trying to flap the birds away from her face so that she could talk to her sort-of-sister. She looked at the outreached hands. "Do you want the bag of feed?"

"Uh huh."

"Be careful, the birds are being... too hungry." Kei narrowed her eyes. "I think Zyuu might have turned the attentiveness factors up too high," she added, stepping away to no effect, as the majority of the birds followed her.

Ichi giggled, as a pair of tiny, bright-blue, red-eyed birds fluttered down into her hair, their blunt claws tickling her scalp. Holding one palm out, with a small amount of grain on it, she watched in pleasure as one of the birds jumped off, and began to peck at it, sitting without fear in her outreached palm.

Yui smiled indulgently, and then raised her eyebrows at Kei.

"Hatchi found the air rifle stall, and has begun showing off," explained Kei.

"Ah." Yui paused. "Kei..." she began, her voice soft, "... can you hold Ichi's hand for me, please?"

* * *

...

* * *

The Ree were created by a woman. They were reprogrammed. They grew up. They look human...ish. Some can sort of think like they are human, at least for a short while. They are many copies. And they have a plan.

In fact, according to the board which Iti had set up, before they had 'left' for the party, they had more than a plan. They had a 'PLAIN'. Then, after an issue was raised with that, it was changed to 'PLANE'. Then 'PLN'. Eventually, it was decided that Iti should not be the one who was responsible for doing the writing, and relative peace was restored, with only minor acrimony, and one knife fight.

"Sisters!" proclaimed Kiko, standing up, her hand clutched to her chest, "the not-letting-us-give-Ichi-the-best-presents has gone on way too long. It means that we can't give'er the best presents! And I ask you now, is not an Ichi entitled to the bestest nicest presents ever? 'No!', says Little Mommy, 'that isn't suitable'! I reject this answer, and say that she should too~ootally get the nicest things!"

There was cheering from the rather small crowd, which was clad in the assorted garb of a revolutionary groups. Of more than one, it should be noted, due to the fact that there was disagreement over which one was the most aesthetically pleasing.

"AK-47s for everybodyski!" yelled Hatchi in a thick, and bad Russian accent, clutching onto her fur hat with one hand while the other elevated the ubiquitous assault weapon.

"But, you knoo~oow, Kiko," said Siyon, hanging from her knees from the rafters, dressed entirely in black, "we already did that bit. We just gotta work out who'll do what."

"Oh, I know," her sister replied, shrugging. "Just, right, I spent all meeting thinking of those words, so I wanted to be able to use'em."

The text interface Rei was using to communicate, due to the fact that she was still outside, flashed with up with _How about a nice game of chess?_

"Nah. Chess is boo~ooring, unless you actually get armies for it," said Nana, in the too-short tank top and beret of a South American guerrilla. "_¡Arriba!_"

_Yep. Guess we don't have time._

Kei shot a glance at Nana, before shrugging. "I will serve as a distraction for Little Mommy," she stated.

"Ah, no fair!" protested Kiko. "I want to spend more time around Ichi!"

"Remember, it will be necessary to allay her suspicions as much as possible," Kei said. "You are all aware, of course, how she tries to monitor us at all times in the after-presents playtime. It will be necessary to deliberately keep her attention on Ichi and whosoever does it, such to give the rest of us freedom for Operation: PRESENT."

"But stiii~iill..."

"You wanted to be responsible for the attacks at the petting zoo, anyway. You explicitly said that."

"... oh yeah."

Hatchi nodded, and fired a burst into the ceiling, forcing Siyon to flip out of the way. "Oh, sorryski, Siyon," she said, glancing upwards. "'Kay, then Kei does distractionski, me an' Nana an' Rei do the funfairski."

_A chrysanthemum,  
blossom falls from highest heaven.  
Suu~uure, I'll do it._

"Kiko hitski the pettin' zooski..."

"I'd never ever hit a petting zoo!"

"Iti goeski for the superstructureski," Hatchi continued, ignoring the interruption, "Zyuu for the animalski AIs, an' Siyon runs countermeasureski."

Zyuu grinned a little too widely. "Easy peasy. I made most of the animals, so it's not like it's _haaa~aard_ to convert them into hostile attack interfaces or stuff."

"Yep. That works." A pause. "Guess it's agreed, then."

"Give Ichi our presents, or give us death!" seven voices shouted, and one computer screen displayed.

* * *

...

* * *

Ichi giggled. "Look, Mommy," she exclaimed. "I'm taller than you now, but shorter than I am when I'm normally taller than you!"

Yui smiled, and let out a small burst of laughter herself, just at the pure, honest enthusiasm of the little girl, currently sitting on Kei's shoulders. Together, the physiologically six-year old on the biologically twelve-year old were indeed taller than her. But in an honest, proper sort of way, not from being a sixty-metre tall cybernetically-enhanced metabiological organism, or cheap in-simulation rescaling. The actual kind of thing which could happen in real life, which was the point of these birthday parties, after all. They were meant to give Ichi the closest thing to normalcy that she could get as it was. Attempts to build an Avatar system for her were low priority, compared to all the other things that NERV had to do, all the other things Yui had to cover, and so were always on the backburner, something she promised herself (but never Ichi; it wouldn't do to get her hopes up like that, unless it was certain) that she'd do some day. But probably never would.

On a less depressing note, the kitten had been removed from Ichi's pocket, and placed on Kei's head, where it sat, a feline imperatrix, the mistress of all it surveyed.

"So, Ichi?" Kei asked. "Have you enjoyed yourself since we saw you last?"

"Uh huh!" the little girl replied, petting the kitten. "Let's think, let's think. Oooh! They finished implementing the Dirac Armoury links with me, so I can sort of see into this place where they keep all sorts of things they gave me presents, and which I'll be able to play with when I get a pilot." She paused. "It's very dark in there," Ichi added.

"Really?"

"Yep! Really dark!"

"And how do you feel about that?"

Ichi frowned. "I'm fine. I mean, it's not like I'm in there, or anything. It's just a place where they keep my stuff."

"I meant..." Kei paused, warned off by her mother's glance. "And have you been doing anything else?" she asked.

"Yep. Mommy's been able to make more time for me! Almost an hour every week or so, on the computer, where we can just talk." Ichi grinned, as she glanced over at Yui. "She's been teaching me maths."

"Really," said Kei softly, her voice flat. "What kind of maths?"

"Oh, just, you know, the basics," Ichi said, blushing. "I'm not as smart as any of you. But she did get me a special programme for dealing with the maths she was telling me to help me understand," Ichi frowned, concentrating hard, "free elect-tron... high ener-gy... plas-mas. Because I need to know about them."

Kei blinked for a moment. It was sometimes a little too easy to underestimate Ichi. The fact was, by her estimations, the little brown-haired, blue-eyed girl sitting on her shoulders had the potential to be just as intelligent as Mother or her and her sisters. And could tear any of them apart, but they weren't meant to reminder her of that. "Well done," she said, lost for words.

"Thank you," Ichi said, reaching down to stroke Kei's nose. The blue-haired girl sneezed. Ichi really was a very tactile person, when she thought about it. "And, so, what has been happening with you?" she asked, in return.

The red-eyed girl winced. "Stuff." That wasn't a very good explanation was it? "Just normal domestic stuff with the rest of them. You know, normal stuff. A few... biological issues, but nothing important," she hastened to reassure the little girl.

"Biological issues?" Ichi asked. "Like colds?"

"Oh, did you have another respiratory infection?" Kei asked, trying to change the subject.

Ichi nodded sadly. "Five. They aren't fun," she said, pouting. "I get all gunky and icky. And I feel _horrible_ until I get better."

"We do put you on the right antibiotics or antivirals as soon as we can identify what it is," Yui reassured her daughter.

Ichi nodded. "I know," she said, softly.

"It's just that there's the problem that your biology doesn't act normally to medicine, and we need very, very large doses," she continued.

"Couldn't you have made me smaller, or something?" Ichi asked. "You know, even forty metres would have been easier for everyone. I don't like being a problem for people."

Yui shook her head. "I'm afraid it doesn't work like that. And you're not a problem. You're my daughter, just like Kei and the others are."

"But couldn't you then just keep me in LCL, like them, or something?" the brown-haired girl asked. "They don't get infections."

"I'm afraid not," Yui said, her tone controlled, trying to keep the sympathy outweighing the sadness. "They don't need maintenance or upgrades."

"Don't want a stupid 'self-upgrading' body," Kei muttered. "Don't want stupid _**babies**_ anyway."

"Huh?"

"Nothing, Ichi," Yui said, hastily. "That was nothing, wasn't it, Kei?"

The girl nodded, making the kitten slide around. "Yes. Certainly nothing. Where do you want to go, now, Ichi," she added quickly.

"Let's go to the playground and funfair stuff!" the little girl exclaimed, pointing ahead.

"Lead the way, Ichi!" Yui said, with a smile. It was just as well they'd managed to dodge that thing. She didn't know if, at some point, Ichi would go through puberty. She hoped not. She sincerely hoped that she would never, ever have to find out what a pubescent Evangelion was like.

And, maybe a little selfishly, she wanted Ichi to stay sweet and adorable and little forever, even if it made her feel guilty. She was much nicer like this.

"Just wait a moment, then." Kei paused, and, frowning, opened a communications window. "This is Kei," she said.

"Hee~eey!"

"Heee~ey!"

"Yes, indeed." She paused. "Nana, Rei, we're coming through with Ichi, so you might want to consider getting Hatchi away from the air rifles."

"Yep!"

"Good." She moved to close the window, but before she could, Ichi leaned down from her shoulders, poking her head into the vision range of the screen.

"Hello!"

"Hee~eey Ichi!"

"Hello, Nana." A pause. "What are you doing?"

"Wee~eeell, we're getting y..." Nana began, before Rei shoved her out of the way.

"Heee~eyIchiwe'!" Rei exhaled in one breath. Despite the fact that breathing was not strictly (or, indeed at all) necessary in the simulation, the force of habit, combined with the fact that the body protested when the mind didn't think it was breathing, even if your LCL-immersed physique was, in fact, doing so, meant that everyone did.

"Can I have ice cream, too?" Ichi asked Yui. "I mean, since it is my _birthday_, and everything."

"You can have anything you want while in here," Yui said, picking her words carefully. "In whatever flavour you want."

"Oh, by the way, Mommy," Rei added, leaning towards the invisible camera on the screen, "you might _maa~aybe_ want to kinda warn us if you want to go to the reptile house."

"Oh, we've already been there," Ichi said, as Yui narrowed her eyes.

"Why, Rei?" she asked, her tone suspicious.

"Wee~eell, Zyuu kinda let the Godzilla out so she could polish and shine and clean it properly. Remember, it is totally kinda her own pet that she leant for the party," Rei added, hopefully.

"And is it eating things?" Yui continued, wearily.

Rei looked shocked. "'Course not. You can go check on her and all. It's just that... um, it made a mess. On the floor."

In between Ichi's helpless giggles, Yui could only about manage an "Ah."

Kei finally managed to close the communications window. "See? Everything is fine. It's all going just as planned."

Yui glanced at the girl, one eyebrow raised.

"...for the party," Kei hastily corrected herself. "As planned for the party."

Yui continued to stare.

"Apart from the obvious bits like me getting in a fight with Iti," the girl conceded. "Well, it has not gone all horribly wrong yet. Which is better than some years."

Yui sighed. "True."

"Come on," called out Ichi, from the top of Kei's shoulders. "I wanna go on the slides and the roundabouts and the everythings!"

* * *

...

* * *

"Fly, my pretties!" yelled Zyuu, as she rampaged through the zoo on the back of the giant scaled lizard; the monster clamped between her thighs, riding it hard. The breath of the creature, which should, had Little Mommy not neutered its real function, have been highly radioactive sun-fire, merely reprogrammed anything it touched, 'borrowing' the higher authority access codes that Rei had obtained a few days ago from one of the Bridge Bunnies. The victim was going to be in quite a bit of trouble when they checked the access permissions, but... well, this was all in the name of getting Ichi better presents, so that made it okay, yep?

Nearby, a cage of winged monkeys chattered as the flame washed over them, then froze, as their limited AIs suddenly devoted themselves to probing the structure of the greater programme, their requests to the central CPU increasing arithmetically with time.

* * *

...

* * *

Dr Ritsuko Akagi was, by the standards of today, relaxing. Which meant that she was hunched over a computer screen, trying to monitor the activity of the seven Ree not within visual range of Yui, and keeping herself focussed with clinically unhealthy amounts of caffeine.

It did help that while her roommate at university may have spent her time training her liver to be able to resist immersion in pure ethanol, Ritsuko had been more productive, and so could control the shakes that enough coffee to make a sloth start vibrating should be causing.

She leant backwards, thought wistfully of a cigarette, and flicked over to the next monitored section.

"... so, yep, if you put micromorphs of metamaterial stuff in the bullets, you can have them dynamically shift their stuff so that they guide their own way in! How totally awesome is that!" exclaimed Hatchi, air rifle in hand.

"Nuh uh! It makes way more sense to pack more 'plosives in! Who cares if you actually, you know, hit anything, long as stuff blows up, and your gun is ree~eeally loud!" Nana replied.

"That's a stupid way to do things!"

"Your face is stupid!"

Hatchi narrowed her eyes at her sister. "Uh... ? Heeeey~? We're clones! You just hit yourself with that, stupid!"

"Weee~eeell... your mom is stupid!"

"Still clones! Also, you know, totally objectively wrong, you know."

"Yep," said Rei, spitting out another toy won on the claw machine, if you define 'won on' as 'obtained by punching through the glass of'. "You know, most of the stuff in the standard escalation of insults just doesn't work with us, does it?"

_Ah,_ Ritsuko thought, _just a discussion of armaments and weaponry, and then bickering. Nothing important._ She made a mental note to recover this section for later use. These discussions could be useful, especially once they had worked out what all the metasyntactic variables in the dialogue were. The HMP-01 was just starting to make its way out of prototyping, and, as soon as they worked out those niggling little issues (like the fact that it had an integral targeting computer which defaulted to displaying trick shots rather than actually shooting the foe), it would make a good small-calibre weapon for NERV's internal security forces.

She changed again. Yes, Kiko was still buried under a mound of animals at the petting zoo. She could just about see the occasional glimpse of pale skin and blue hair, as lahars of cute and fluffy things disturbed the mound. Just to be sure, she flicked to wireframe mode... yes, Kiko was there. There were, Ritsuko frowned... some odd visual artefacts around her hands, but, yes, looking at the structure, there was nothing there. Just the fact that Kiko was causing a memory buffer overflow. Fur was horribly processor intensive to render, after all.

Siyon... Siyon was standing perfectly motionless, arms held out rigid, eyes closed, in the middle of a small grove of trees. It was more effective camouflage than one might have at first suspected, considering the ash-pale bark, blue leaves and red fruit of the trees. It still didn't make much sense. Ritsuko 'got' Siyon less than the others, perhaps because the fact that she disturbed the scientist more than most. There was something about her that just seemed to scream of her original function.

Still, at least she was quiet, and wasn't killing things.

She couldn't find Iti anywhere. Teeth locked in a rictus grin, the brown haired woman began to search again, while her other hand prepared an emergency contact for Yui.

Wait. No, there she was. Hanging peacefully upside down from a tree, eating an icecream. It was noticeable that the icecream was held the right way up, which produced a rather unusual pattern of bite marks.

Ritsuko began to relax again. Just a minor glitch. There was no problems tracking Zyuu, luckily; she was where she was always going to be, polishing the scales on the giant saurid she had prepared for this party. The brown-haired woman guessed that it must be some equivalent to the phase some girls went through, when they obsessed about ponies. Ritsuko hadn't done that. She'd been given a cell culture growth kit for _her_ eighth birthday.

Ritsuko sighed, and began the cycle again.

"... so, yep, if you put micromorphs of metamaterial stuff in the bullets, you can have them dynamically shift their stuff so that they guide their own way in! How totally awesome is that!" exclaimed Hatchi, air rifle in hand.

Huh?

"Nuh uh! It makes way more sense to pack more 'plosives in! Who cares if you actually, you know, hit anything, long as stuff blows up, and your gun is ree~eeally loud!" Nana replied.

Oh. Oh. Oooo~ooooh.

They were _looping_ her. And that meant that they had other access to what she was seeing.

It was then than Ritsuko noticed the slight hum of her speakers. She had been ignoring them; it had been just a background noise, nothing compared to the whine of the fan. But now, now that she knew something sinister was going on, she could hear the very, very quiet organ music playing through her own damn speakers.

It was very dramatically appropriate.

"Siyon!" she growled, cracking her knuckles, and getting ready to fight whatever was going on.

* * *

...

* * *

"Whee~eee!"

With a loud splash of something which resembled water, but lacked the ability to actually get you wet (one of the advantages of not actually being in reality), Ichi emerged from the flume, and clambered out of the pool. The AI of the kitten, not designed to leave the petting zoo, mewed confused error messages at the unfamiliar environment, but since it had been returned to the girl's front pocket, it couldn't do much.

Which probably was for the best. When it was immersed, the AI had not been able to tell whether it was dead or alive.

Petting the confused beast, Ichi trotted over to her mother and sister, who seemed to be having some kind of conversation.

"... but _why_ should my body be doing this? I don't want it to, so it shouldn't!" Kei sniffed. "I don't like my body wanting things like this without me wanting them! And _they're_ all fine with it; happier, even! Why can't I stop it happening if I don't want it?"

"It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid. It's just something that we girls have to..." Yui noticed the little brown-haired girl. "Yes, Ichi?"

"What are you two talking about?" she asked, cocking her head slightly.

Both of them blushed slightly, which only made Ichi more curious. "You know how you sometimes get respiratory infections, and need maintenance checks, Ichi?" her mother said, slowly.

"Uh huh. But they don't."

"Yes, we don't," Kei explained. "But... um..."

"But they've been starting to develop some... issues, and we're discussing how to resolve them," continued Yui.

"Ah." Ichi nodded. "Antibiotics."

"It's not that kind of problem, darling."

Ichi's lips formed a silent O. "I see. It's a virus, isn't it? Because you can't use antibiotics against viruses. You explained that to me first time I had one."

"Again, not quite that sort of problem. But..."

"Is Rei suffering too? Maybe there's a problem with their maintenance teams." She frowned. "Maybe you should send them on a team training exercise or something."

Ichi thought she could see her mother shudder slightly. "Yes, it's all of them, including Rei. It's based off their cell tissue origin, not anything infectious. And... um, remember, Ichi, they don't have maintenance teams. Only you're special enough to have them."

"Oh." Ichi paused. "Am I going to have the same problems?"

"You should hope you don't," Kei muttered. "Really hope that you don't."

"Probably not," Yui hastened to reassure the little girl. "It comes from the part of them that comes from me, because I had the same thing at the same age, and it's not dangerous. It's not just enjoyable while it happens."

"I see," nodded Ichi, who didn't understand, but trusted Mommy enough that everything was okay, and her sisters weren't in trouble. Because that would be bad. "Kei, you look sad."

"I am not," the girl responded, as she wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

"Yes, you are," Ichi insisted, before grabbing her hand, pulling with remarkable strength. "Come on. We're getting candy floss." She paused. "I would get you some, Mommy, but you can't have any," she added, with a hint of disappointment.

"No, it's fine, Ichi," Yui said. "I need to talk to Ritsuko, to check that everything's going okay on the rea... outside world side of things, anyway."

Kei swallowed. "There was one more thing I wanted to mention, Mother, before we got distracted." She managed to free herself from Ichi's tight grip enough to lean over, and whisper to her mother. Ichi leaned in, too, but failed to catch any of Kei's words

"I see," said Yui, through narrowed eyes. "Are they?"

Kei nodded mutely.

"I see we're all going to have a _chat_ after this. Depending on how it turns out, there may be something worse." Yui sighed. "But I'm not going to make a fuss now. Go have your candy floss"

Hand in hand, the two girls headed down the street of the funfair. In the distance, a diminished, but still rather large lizard rampaged, reprogramming anything that got in the way of its breath, cheered on by Nana. The trees were moving; unnaturally, suddenly iridescent leaves writing words against the sky. Words, and source code. Even the light flickered, as the subtleties of what Iti was doing to the superstructure of the programme drew processing power from the shadow rendering. Somewhere over the horizon, a giant explosion of fluff and cute blossomed up like a giant rose, as Kiko overloaded the fuzzy logic sector.

Oddly, everything avoided the area Ichi was in. There was a vast bubble of enforced normalcy surrounding her. All part of the plan to reduce the punishment they would face later.

Ichi turned to Kei, and, in a expression which could have fitted perfectly onto Yui's face, raised her eyebrows.

"Ah." Kei sucked in a breath. "We were trying to arrange a little surprise for you. It _may_ have gone slightly wrong." Bending down, she wrapped an arm around Ichi, all the way around to her pockets at the back, and hugged her tightly. "We may be about to get in a bit of trouble for this. But it was worth it, for you."

Ichi smiled. She _liked_ her birthdays.

* * *

...

* * *

But the day, like all days, came to an end. And goodbyes were said, and hugs were given, and Ichi was a good girl and just about managed not to cry.

The technical crews kicked into activity for the second time today. There was a certain laxity, a certain ease of manoeuvre which hadn't been there this morning, for, as far as most of them were concerned, a stressful (and unnecessary) form of yearly maintenance had been performed, and now it was over.

The cries of synchronised motion, and the creak of machinery could be heard, as the vast, reinforced party hat was hoisted off from Unit 01, slowly and ponderously swung around, until it could be transferred to the mechanism which would return it to storage. Thankfully, they could leave the nutrient feeds in place; the Evangelion would ingest the remainder of the calorific and chocolaty mess over the next week or so, and so that was a problem to be left for another day. Along with the... _other_ problem that such a thing caused. Well, that and the fact that no-one was looking for a repeat of the 5th birthday.

There was a sigh when it was finally done.

"Well, that's over," Ritsuko said, wiping her brow, to broad cheers from the others in the room. "Good job, everyone."

And with that said, people began the slow process of filing out, shutting down their machinery and taking off their protective gear. Most were headed to the afterParty, where there was usually mass drunkenness, to go with the party food provided on NERV's budget.

The last one to leave turned out the lights, leaving Unit 01 in the dark.

* * *

...


	4. Episode 04: Cleanup

**Neon Genesis Evangelion: Nobody Dies: Ichi's Birthday Party**

**Episode 04 – Cleanup**

* * *

...

* * *

And now it was over, and Yui and Gendo were in the spacious office of the Commander, doing the paperwork which the incident had generated. Somehow, Fuyutsuki had managed to disappear such that neither the Magi, nor Yui's instruction of "Rei! Fetch!" had been able to find a trace of him. It was really quite impressive, actually, although, of course, he had had the entire duration of the party to prepare his escape.

He would be back, of course. The question was whether he would be found before Rei would come down on the sugar high she was currently on. As a result, the vents of NERV were aloud with whooping and the sound of someone running around in them very, very fast. The echoes were filling the place, and leaving the staff on edge.

Yui didn't even understand how she could run in those vents. Surely they weren't tall enough...

Rei had, once again, managed to work her way into the vats of liquidised cake before Ichi had been able to finish it all, without breaking any of the seals. And... well, Ichi wouldn't miss the amount that even Rei could eat, considering the size of the cake compared to that of a human scaled one, and as long as Ichi didn't find out (which she had, for her fifth birthday, and there had been a tantrum. An Eva-scaled tantrum), nobody died.

Coincidentally, she was also checking the Magi's estimated figures for the increased rate of accidents for two weeks after the actual party. The statistics were pretty accurate, going by previous precedent. She was also still thankful that Ichi had not managed to work out the cause of the change in Rei's behaviour, because there was a blip in the damage statistics for the 5th birthday. They had found it necessary to get Ichi a second cake that year, to make up for it. And Rei hadn't got any pocket money for three months, and the only reason they had started doing so again was that it had been necessary to put an end to the activities of a diminutive bank robber, who had been taking hostages and holding up armoured cars for utterly trivial amounts.

"So," asked Gendo, his voice distracted, "did you have fun?"

Yui smiled. "Yes, actually. They are so sweet together. I do really wish that... that none of this was necessary, and we could actually be a proper family, but... yes, the look on her face, and how _much_ she enjoyed herself," Yui shook her head. "It makes me feel horribly guilty, but she's just so adorable."

"Glad that it's over until next year?"

"Oh, God, yes." Yui's head collapsed onto her arms, resting on the desk. "Yes, yes, yes."

"So you have seen the network security report?" Gendo asked.

Yui nodded, biting her lip. Gendo took that as all the encouragement he needed.

"Multiple widespread attempted breaches of Unit 01's network by the Ree. In fact, what it resembled most was a present-based directed denial of service attack. Ritsuko and I first suspected that they were trying to overwhelm the defences through sheer numbers, since they were really unsubtle."

"Mmhuhm."

"And then that's when the subtleties started to emerge." The man pushed his glasses back up onto his nose. "Some of those attacks were brilliant. Ones which exploited the overflow errors they'd previously set up. Ones which Ritsuko insisted on calling 'necrosexual' viruses, in which the act of deleting them made them, and all the ones around them replicate faster." He shook his head. "Even some programmes which only worked if they were stopped from working; interrupting the executable changed it into a completely different programme."

Yui nodded. "Yes. It might have actually got problematic had we not been warned in advance that they were going to try that."

There was a click of fingers on a keyboard. "Mmuhuh," agreed Gendo. "We've handed them over to R&D to try to reverse-engineer. On," he added, "completely isolated networks. We can't risk letting the code out into the wider internet."

Both of them shuddered at the idea of the Ree in charge of the global telecommunications system. Because that was basically an inevitability, if their dedicated subversion software was let out into the 'wild'. Much as Yui was loathe to admit it (though Gendo was not), the Reetrix was essentially the digital equivalent of a bioweapons research lab. With very lax handling procedures, and rather malevolent (or, at the very least, careless and unthinking of the consequences) researchers. Who were immune to whatever they cooked up. A fun combination.

There was silence, only interrupted by the clacking of keys as the two worked on the budget. Then;

"Yui?"

"Yes."

"Why do you think Kei told you about what the rest of them were planning?"

"Because I believe that she's a genuinely sweet girl who understands that her sisters would be a bad influence on Ichi, if not restrained, and has the personal maturity to acknowledge that." Yui said in an earnest voice, and then paused. "Or it may have just been a way of getting back at them for whatever reason," she added.

Gendo fixed her with a stare, over the top of his glasses. "Yui..." he began.

* * *

...

* * *

Ichi lay back upon her bed, a smile on her face. She could feel the very, very pleasing heaviness in her physical body, the change in her metabiochemistry from all that sugar and chocolate feeling _nice_, and, of course, she had got to have a day of fun with _everybody_. They'd had the fight, they'd had the presents, they'd had the cake, and she got to spend lots and lots and lots of time with Mommy.

Underneath the contentment, though, was just a hint of melancholia. Because now it was over, and it wouldn't be coming for another year. Maybe the occasional visit from Mommy, maybe, perhaps even a brief contact with her sorta-sisters, but nothing like this. Her one special day, which got to be all about her. Over again. For another year.

Ichi considered herself very lucky to get it at all.

Wriggling slightly, she bounced up and down on her bed, in the little house that stood on the grassy plain which was the dataspace she spent most of her time in. There was something in one of her back pockets, digging into her. Rolling over onto her front, she managed to lever it out. It was a miracle it had got in there in the first place, actually, because, somehow, the intact card was larger than the opening of the top of the pocket, and yet it had not been folded at all.

The handwriting on the front was neat, and precise. And what it said on the crisp white card was quite simple.

_Ichi_

Tongue sticking out slightly, Ichi tore open the envelope, only to get a sudden, almost blinding emanation of green-white light from the seams where she breached it. Suddenly worried, she tried to smooth it back down, but it tore itself apart, the forces coming from within enough to prevent any of her attempts to block their release.

Blinking heavily, the little girl rolled off her bed, away from the light. Slowly, carefully, a mass of ruffled brown hair poked its way back over the side, to be followed by the rest of her hair.

There appeared to be a _tree_ sprouting from her bed. A very, very, _very_ high resolution tree; in the greenish-white light still emanating upwards, she could see every last bump and wrinkle in it. Flicking her vision to the rarely used information (as opposed to immersion) mode, Ichi could see the massive amount of data associated with it, and the area around it.

Slowly, she climbed back onto her bed. There was... the way to describe it was that there was a plane of _difference_, where there ceased to be bedroom, and started to be what looked to be a glowing portal to another dataspace; one rich in greenery, the rich, moist scent of wet vegetation wafting through.

There were two notes, flung aside when the envelope tore itself apart. Ichi looked at the larger one first.

_Heee~ey Ichi!_

_Super-Duper-Mega-Awesome-Bestest Eighth Birthday! We were thinking, right, that we never get to give you the best presents, so we thought we'd make up for it by getting you everything we can, to make it up to you. We hope you have so, so much fun with it, because we worked really super-hard to get it to you! We really want to get to spend more time with you, but we can't, and this might try to make up for it.!_

_Lots and lots and lots of really big Love,_

_From,  
__  
Rei – It was all my idea in the first place!  
Iti - I went and made all the trees for you personally. They're all realistic with their growth patterns and stuff!  
Siyon - I made the bad guys!  
Nana – The environment's going to be really realistic (especially when it breaks) because of me!  
Kiko – You're going to look really, really, really adorable in the costumes! All of them!  
Hatchi – Minions! You're going to be in charge, so you need minions!  
Zyuu – I made you a dragon! He's really, really awesome! Also, the prince.  
Kei – I wrote the plot for the story, and also vetted everything, to ensure that Mother will not object to you receiving it._

_PS. Lots and lots of superlove! Yay! XOXOXOX!_

Her finger tracking the words, Ichi got part way through, before frowning. "Dragon?"

Something chirruped. Ichi poked her head over the dataspace portal, curious to see what was making the noise.

The beast was undeniably draconic; serpentine, even, ophidian, in inclination. Two wings, the wingspan larger than its body, were stretched out, iridescent shimmering light reflecting off the bat-like structure. Two giant golden eyes stared up at Ichi, rich with a certain cunning intelligence, over a maw of adamant teeth. The mainstay of its hide was the rich purple of a Roman emperor, through, overlaying it, like oil on water, was a viridian sheen, which caught the eye and demanded attention. It was undeniably a handsome... nay, majestic beast.

It was also about the size of a large cat.

There were two squeaks of pleasure, one from Ichi, one from the dragon, as they gazed at each other.

"So _cute!_" managed Ichi, in a tone not entirely unlike the sound of escaping steam; a similarity which only increased as the dragon, with a great flapping of wings, out of the breach, and onto her shoulder. "Oh, you are _adorable_. I'm going to call you Mr Flappy, and we're going to have so much fun together!"

The dragon cooed at her, producing a similar noise back, as it flopped back onto those parts of her bed which were not taken up by the portal, and accepted a tummy rub.

It was, therefore, a while later when Ichi actually got around to reading the second note.

_Dear Ichi,_

_It is not certain that you will be reading this, so if another person is doing so, I would request that you put it back where you found it, and let Ichi have it. But, nevertheless, Ichi, if you have this, and things had gone as planned, then this will be the only part of Operation: PRESENT which you shall receive. The first note explains the broad circumstances of this gift; this note has the function of explaining things further._

_I used my sisters' activities, and their attempts to get other presents to you, as a distraction to get this one gift to you. Contained within is the product of a cooperative work between all eight of us. We have built a fully realised pseudo-medieval dataspace for you, while keeping it as something we __hope that you will enjoy. It was hard work, but we believe that it is worth it._

_Just for you, our little sister._

_Happy Birthday._

_With Love,_

_From,_

_Kei_

_PS – The dragon was originally going to be 200 metres long. I had to get Kiko to back me up and overrule Zyuu on that._

_PPS – Mother, when you do eventually read this, whether by interception, or by simply looking through Ichi's dataspaces, note how the contents have been vetted, and chosen to be suitable for her. Please let her keep it._

Ichi frowned, and pulled a dictionary from one of her shelves, to look for some of the harder words which were being used. Once that necessary part had been done, she looked down at the dragon, which had fallen asleep while she checked the meanings of some of the unnecessarily long words.

"Come on," she said, softly. "Let's go see what this is about, Mr Flappy."

Scooping the dragon up in both arms, which didn't protest at all at the slightly rough treatment, she clambered up onto the bed, and dropped through into the foreign dataspace.

The little girl found herself deep in a very green, and very, very detailed forest, complete with sparkling streams, wildlife, bits where the-light-broke-the-canopy-just-so, and all the other clichés of fantasy forests. Looking down, too, she seemed to have changed into a very elaborate, multi-layered white dress (which, instinctively, she felt was inappropriate for this kind of place),and reaching up to her head, she felt that the sudden weight on it was a tiara.

Slowly, gazing around at how much effort must have been put into this place, she took steps towards the clearing she could see somewhere ahead of her, dragon still carried in both arms. Emerging, blinking into the sudden sunlight, she could suddenly see an ornate castle, with walls of white marble, and vast towering spires. In a sense, however, even that paled, in comparison, to the mass of people waiting before the walls. They were so detailed. They even _all_ had different faces. And, notably, they also had pictures of her face on tapestried banners.

"All hail Princess Ichi!" the crowd in front of her shouted.

* * *

...

* * *

"...you knew about the data cache that Kei snuck past security, don't you?"

Yui then smirked. "But of course. And by 'Kei snuck past', you mean, 'I let through', correct?"

Gendo frowned. "In that case, you managed to conceal the changes you made, and made it look like entirely her work. Very well, I might add."

Yui flapped a hand at him. "You old charmer, you!"

There was only one question to be asked. "Why?"

"I did check what was in it, first. I'm not stupid, dear. It was fairly clear that the act of telling me was an attempt to convey my favour, and also distract me from _something_."

Gendo did not say _Because that's what you would have done, but more competently_, because he did not appreciate having to sleep on the couch.

"And... well, nothing there was going to be bad for Ichi," Yui continued. "Some of it pushed the boundaries of what I _personally_ would have permitted, but there wasn't anything really dangerous or psychologically harmful. And she'll like them."

The man's eyebrows raised above his glasses. "Even the dragon?"

"Especially the dragon," Yui said through narrowed eyes. "You know how much I wanted a pet dragon when I was her age?" she added, rhetorically.

"A lot?"

"Yes, a lot! I would have killed for it! It would have been a sort of greenish-blue, with golden eyes, and I would have raised it all the way from a hatchling. I would have snuggled it, and taught it to fly, and to breath fire (which would have been blue-white, because that's the hottest colour), and called it 'Inferno, Destroyer of Worlds', and then we would have... well, probably set fire to my brother's room, come to think of it... and I would have shown it to all the girls at school, and it would have been really, really cool!" Yui was turning more than a little red.

Gendo said nothing, in a very telling manner.

Yui coughed.

Gendo continued to say nothing.

"I asked for one for every single birthday between when I was five, and when I was twelve," Yui added, weakly.

Gendo's silence was deafening.

"My father never got me one."

"Because. Dragons. Aren't. Real."

Yui sighed. "Actually, that wasn't his reasoning. He told me that if I wanted one so much, I should work out how to build one myself."

"And is that the traumatic story of why you became a metabiologist?" Gendo asked. His glasses were currently set to opaque, but his wife suspected that he was rolling his eyes at her behind them.

"In retrospect, I think he was joking," Yui admitted.

"Was that a 'Yes' or a 'No'."

"That was a 'No, that's utterly ridiculous to suggest that someone's life could be shaped by something that small', darling," Yui said, in a tone which suggested he was on thin ice.

"I see," the dark-haired man said, taking his glasses off, and cleaning them, as a way of breaking his wife's terawatt-stare. "So... just to make things clear, Kei wasn't using a real hole in the security between the Unit 01 network and Magi 00?"

There was a clattering overhead, as Rei sprinted through the ductwork above the Commander's office, and away again.

Yui shook her head. "Not quite. That would be a..." she paused, "... yes, as I recall, that specific weakness is one of my seventh-level decoys, which requires you to exploit subtle actual weaknesses hidden in the structure of multiple sixth and fifth level ones. Which you can only do if you notice that they're all traps. It's well done, certainly, but the fact is, I was always going to notice the sheer amount of data that you'd have to transfer for all those high-quality VR programmes, when the limited bandwidth I permit them from Magi 00 is taken into account." She paused. "Still, it was enough that it has to be caught on the transfer buffers, for personal approval, rather than any of the Magi defences. It might have actually worked had someone inattentive been on monitoring duties."

Both the man and the woman suddenly sat bolt upright, and simultaneously made a personal note of _Don't let Lieutenant Aoba monitor the connection_.

"I'll have Ritsuko fix it," Gendo said, adding another note.

"Yes. Do that."

"Of course, that's another escape method caught. We can add it to the Library."

"Yes." Yui paused, a smile creeping across her face, as she stood up to stretch her legs. "I'm actually rather pleased that she used it to get secret presents through to Ichi, rather than an actual escape. Still, not good enough to put one over her mother, eh?"

"No, dear."

"No, not good enough by half."

"Indeed, dear." Gendo paused. "Do you think both Ichi and the Ree are good for each other, really?" he asked, obvious doubt in his voice. "Do you really want to expose them to it?"

Yui nodded, more seriously, stepping around the table. "Yes. At least one way. I'd be more wary of giving them unrestrained access to her, but controlled interactions are a good change for them, and... well, interactions with another more human-baseline mind have to be good," she admitted. "She's not the one who worries me, much as you disagree. And they're so _sweet_ when they're being big-sisterly." She paused. "Trying to be big-sisterly. Trying to be what they _think_ is big-sisterly."

"You should probably just stop."

"Good point." Yui leant down, to give her husband a kiss on the lips.

"You did well, managing to handle all of them like that," he said, when they came up for air. "I couldn't have done it."

That was the last thing which was said for a while. And even the whooping and hollering of the sugar-crazed Rei in the pipes overhead wasn't enough to distract them from their more... pressing business.

Well, apart from when Yui had to throw a shoe at Rei, which the girl easily caught (and then ate) to make her stop watching.

* * *

...

* * *

_And so it was that Princess Ichi, the radiant and very pretty ruler of the kingdom of Nervia, stepped out onto her balcony, and gazed over the landscape._

"It is very pretty, isn't it? I like the trees, and how they have the light shining through them. I wonder if I can move them to my house."

_said the Princess. She was not alone, of course, for her trusty, and utterly adorable pet dragon, which sat on her shoulder was with her, as well as her loyal Narrator. But the Princess was troubled, for fell deeds were afoo..._

"Awww!" Ichi knelt by the cat-sized dragon, tickling his belly. The purple-green animal started cooing at her, rolling on its back, and emitting little puffs of hot air.

_But the Princess was troubled, for..._

"I think we should go get you some food, Mr Flappy." She picked up the dragon, nesting him on her shoulder, as she picked him up, still tickling him between his ears.

_...fell deeds were afoot._

Ichi turned, and stared at the ceiling, or wherever the voice was coming from. "Well, they're not. Not _really_."

_Yes they are! It says so in the script._

"Yes, but, I mean, they only start happening when I talk to that man with the exclamation mark above his head in the courtyard. Otherwise, it just goes on being happy and fine."

_..._

"And, so, really, I've been thinking, it wouldn't be okay for me to go talk to the man in the courtyard, because lots of people will get hurt if I do, while if I don't, they get to keep on being happy and fun and okay."

_But..._

Ichi stared up at the ceiling. "You're not a very nice person, Mr Narrator. You want to make me hurt people. I mean, I wouldn't be a very good Princess if I did. And Mommy might get angry at me if I did."

_But there are jumping puzzles! And epic fights where you have to persuade the bad guys that what they're doing it wrong, and so they join your side, and fight against the real bad guy!_

"But they're only being bad guys _because_ I talked to that man, if I do." Ichi continued to pet her dragon, who was getting a little agitated. "It means that it's still my fault."

_But..._

"So, instead, I'm just going to play here, in all those really cool forests with the lovely water effects, and..." Ichi paused, "maybe we can get you some fish, Mr Flappy? Would you like that?"

The dragon cooed, its head bobbing up and down.

"I think you do." The little girl hugged him tighter. "I think you really do. So, Mr Narrator, are there any fish in the streams nearby?"

_... yes. Yes, there are._

"Good." Ichi stepped out the door, before poking her head back in. "And don't you _dare_ attack me with monsters or anything, because if you do, I'll leave this worldspace, and not come back ever."

_But there's a handsome prince you have to rescue from a wicked wizard!_

Ichi wrinkled up her nose. "Why would I want to do that? Can't he rescue himself? Not much of a prince, if he can't fight off a single wicked wizard." She shook her head. "Come on. Let's go get some fish, fish, fishidy fishidy fish," she sung to the little dragon, which joined in with a thin howl, as she skipped through the castle, leaving the Narrator behind.

Because, after all, whatever else she may have been, Ichi was her mother's daughter.

* * *

...


	5. Episode 05: Epilogue

**Neon Genesis Evangelion: Nobody Dies: Ichi's Birthday Party**

**Episode 05 – Epilogue**

* * *

...

* * *

_Hello!_

_Um... well, Rei and Iti and Nana and Zyuu and Siyon and Hatchi and Kiko, who are sort of my sisters, said that I should do a boast, and it was traditional or something,_

_And I'm not sure that I really want to,_

_I mean, I don't really understand the point._

_But it sounded like fun, and Mommy didn't say I shouldn't, so I will._

_And they said that they asked her, and she said it was okay, so it's all okay, right?_

_Anyway, um, I exist because something happened with Mommy and the Me-Before-I-Was-Me, who is something to do with what my sisters... or maybe half-sisters, call Big Mommy._

_I don't really understand that bit._

_And some days I want to go and play outside in the Base Earth, but Mommy says I can't,_

_And so I get to play in my own special world. Mommy built most of it herself, but some bits were made as presents by my sisters._

_I tried making some stuff myself, but I'm not as clever as any of them._

_Anyway, I like cake, hugs, music, and spending time with my family._

_Cake is tasty and fills up my tummy much better than the normal food I get._

_Hugs are warm and soft and lovely._

_Music is fun, and sounds nice._

_And my family are all really nice people, and I have fun when I'm around them._

_I wish I could do all of them more._

_And I would like to see Shinji again, because he was nice to me when I was younger, but I haven't seen him in ages._

_Mommy doesn't let me use the internet to talk to him anymore,_

_I'm not allowed to get too angry or upset, because that damages things,_

_And that makes me sad, because it makes Mommy sad._

_Sometimes she cries when she looks at me, when she thinks I'm not active._

_I don't like it when she does that. It makes me sad, too._

_I don't want her to cry._

_I exist because Mommy says that at some point in the future nasty things will come and try to hurt everyone._

_And I'm a good girl, so I want to protect Mommy, and my sisters, and Shinji._

_They didn't say how long this thing was meant to be._

_I can't really think of anything else to say._

_Oh, yes. I forgot to say my name. They said that bit was important._

_Technically, I am Evangelion Unit 01._

_But you can call me Ichi._

_Pleased to meet you._

Yui looked at the print-out of the childish essay, done in virtual space in crayon. Oh, and there were multiple stick figures by the side of the writing; one big and purple and green, and one with brown hair. Both were labelled "Ichi", and standing next to a taller, brown-haired figure labelled "Mommy". The picture was finished up by seven blue-haired figures with smiles which nearly touched their red eyes, and one who had a sad face. She frowned.

"Rei, do you have any idea what this is?" she asked her daughter.

The blue-haired girl shrugged. "Nope," she said.

"Are you sure?"

"Nope." Rei paused. "Or do I mean 'Yep'?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that, nope, I don't know what it is?" The tone was questioning, as if she were hoping that this was the right thing to say.

Yui stared at her, with suspicion. "It says that you gave her the inspiration. Right at the top," she pointed out to her daughter.

"Well, yeee~eeeah, but she had had a lot of sugar and stuff at the time. I mean," Rei added, "I've still sorta got a bit of a sugar headache from a lot less than her."

"Yes, but she's bigger than you, and better able to absorb it."

"I just think it's sorta possible that she mighta maybe have been a bit hyper, and maybe misunderstood a joke or something," Rei continued. "But I do think Ichi has ree~eallly pretty handwriting."

Yui smiled. "Yes, she does, doesn't she? I think this gets to go up on The Wall." The wall behind her desk in her office, was (barring the white-boards propped against it, and currently displaying a Bayesian statistical analysis of the hypothetical strength of an Angelic AT-Field, compared to known values for Nephilim and Evangelion-generated ones) absolutely covered in various art-works, finger paintings, drawings, and the occasional technical schematic for vastly overbudget lunar-mounted photon-based weapons. One of the latter currently sat on her desk, in the IN box, to be brushed aside as Yui went rummaging for pins.

Rei skipped out of the office. Once out, she let a broad grin creep over her face.

"Rei, are you smirking as soon as you're out of visual range?" Yui called after her.

The smile vanished, a hint of a frown emerging. "'Course not," the girl called back.

"Because we're still going to have to have a proper talk about this, young lady!"

"'Kay!"

The lips curled back up after less than five paces.

* * *

...


End file.
